Asus EAH4850 Graphics Card Review

While nVidia was touting its price-is-no-object performance crown with the new GeForce GTX 280, ATI was quietly shipping the first of its new Radeon HD 4850 cards, which cost a third as much and can run today's most demanding games on typical systems. Unlike the GTX 280, the HD 4850 won't let you crank all the settings to full on the latest games on a 30-inch monitor. But for the typical 3D user, it provides plenty of oomph, with performance rivaling cards that until very recently cost $350.

One testament to this card's excellent performance: nVidia dropped the price of its previous top-end single-GPU card, the GeForce 9800 GTX, to match that of the HD 4850. Our review card, an Asus EAH4850, offers performance comparable to the formerly $350 9800 GTX but bests it by supporting DirectX 10.1 (DX10.1); by not blocking an adjacent slot; by requiring just one power connector instead of two; and by including a DVI-to-HDMI adapter.

The Asus EAH4850 is a single-slot PCI Express (PCIe) 2.0 card that uses one six-pin power connector and a 450-watt power supply. It features two dual-link DVI ports ready for High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), the aforementioned HDMI converter, and an analog video port that supports S-Video and component output. The card is based on the new RV770 GPU, which boasts 800 shader units and 956 million transistors, compared with 320 shaders and 666 million transistors for the last-generation HD 3850. The EAH4850 includes 512MB of GDDR3 memory and is bundled with the Asus overclocking and screen- and video-capture utilities.

Image quality is excellent; both ATI and nVidia now have anti-aliasing and filtering down to an art. ATI's Avivo HD technology enables hardware decoding of the H.264 and VC-1 compression used by HD-DVD and Blu-ray video discs. The card supports HD audio over the HDMI cable.

Performance, meanwhile, is stellar for a card in the EAH4850's price range. Overall, the card runs neck and neck with nVidia's GeForce 9800 GTX in our benchmark tests, with the cards trading places for the lead depending on the game and the resolution. In our Company of Heroes DX10 tests, the EAH4850 clocked 54.7 frames per second (fps) at 1,280x1,024; 35.6fps at 1,920x1,200; and 23.8fps at 2,560x1,600. Granted, the 9800 GTX's 98.3fps at 1,280x1,024 blows the EAH4850 out of the water, but the Asus entry nearly matched the 9800 GTX's score of 40.5fps at 1,920x1,200 and bested its 19.7fps at 2,560x1,600. In our World in Conflict test, the EAH4850 slightly edged out the nVidia card, scoring 51fps, 27fps, and 14fps at the aforementioned resolutions, compared with 49fps, 23fps, and 10fps, respectively, for the 9800 GTX. The EAH4850's scores in Futuremark's 3DMark06 fell below those of the 9800 GTX, but the EAH4850 beat the 9800 GTX at both Entry and Extreme settings in the new 3DMark Vantage DX10 benchmark suite.

To boost performance even further, you can drop up to three additional EAH4850 cards into a system that has a CrossFireX-compatible motherboard and additional PCIe slots.

We had one big complaint: Though the EAH4850's fan is nearly silent at idle, the single-slot cooler doesn't seem to do a great job of cooling the card. We saw an idle temperature of 78 degrees Celsius in a roomy, well-ventilated case, rising to 85 degrees under load. Not only will those high temps increase system heat, they also mean the HD4850 isn't likely to tolerate much overclocking.

Still, the EAH4850 is a great performer for the price. Not long ago, comparably performing cards fell into the $350 to $400 price range. The EAH4850 is fast enough to run newer games at playable frame rates at resolutions up to 1,920x1,200 with all the details cranked, and that's plenty fast for many gamers. ATI may not compete at the high end nowadays, but at mainstream prices, it gives nVidia a serious run for the money.